I get the reference, but I can't in good faith give this more than a low score. If anyone else uploaded this it would probably be blammed. It would also be funnier if this actually was your first animation because you could have titled it This is the Only Movie.

Regarding the animation itself, there's not much to say other than that you've got one sprite and a lot of mileage out of the free transform tool. It's bad on purpose so I don't know what more is worth discussing.

The animation here is simple but really smooth. I felt that the style struck a really good balance between feeling well-made while also harkening back to some of the cruder animation emblematic of the peak Flash years. I do wish it had been a bit longer though.

The old music made me think this would have felt a lot more cinematic in black and white or with low saturation, maybe with some high contrast film noir lighting.

The grainy texture on the images looks great and makes this really feel like a pre-Flash cartoon of the 90s or earlier. You also really nailed the art style, and it really makes the animation pleasant to the eye.

Humor-wise I didn't find this especially entertaining, but it's only 2 minutes so the unfunny-ness isn't that painful to sit through, especially when the aesthetic makes up for it a lot.

There are two main hiccups that I think drags this down considerably. First, some of the animation is just way too simple. Some of the really simple stuff (like the camera pan in the beginning) have a low framerate and look jerky. The two frame loop of the rat digging through boxes looks really crude, and it wouldn't have taken THAT many more frames to create a loop (even a low framerate one) that looked less sloppy. The screen shake at the very end is another example of this - just a few more frames to slow this down would make it look more like something that might actually air on Cartoon Network.

The second issue is the timing. Not just comedic timing, but the timing of the shots as well. It's a short animation (under 2 minutes) yet panning and fading transitions are all we see for the first 30 seconds of it. Some of the relatively short shots should be even shorter, like the rat tearing apart the box, or the first shot of him reaching into it (you play the same loop later and that time it's shown for the right amount of time.) Similarly, both shots of the rat holding the snow globe are just a little too long, as well as the still shot of the mess the rat made. All of these things might seem like nitpicks, but if you imagine how awkward it might be to talk to someone that randomly inserted... half second pauses while speaking... to you, it makes sense how not only these small differences of a fraction of a second can create a disruptive experience, but how a bunch of them back to back make the final product look unpolished.

If this game had been finished it would have absolutely annihilated every other submission this year.

The insane production quality reminds me a lot of Arcane Maiden, the winner of the first (2021) FFGJ. Aesthetics on their own go a long way but I got REALLY hyped to play a tactical RPG (I haven't finished Fire Emblem but FFT is my all-time favorite game.)

Regarding the singular, partly working battle, the number of enemies is too much. You did well to have only some enemies engage the party and have to approach others, and not just due to the difficulty - waiting through an enemy phase in which all 30 enemies acted would have been incredibly tedious. I also liked that at least several of the characters had a very distinct identity; it took two playthroughs, but on my second go I was able to find niches where the general, archer, and white mage were effective and it made a gigantic difference.

As you're likely already aware, there are a bunch of game-breaking bugs. Characters will randomly stop being useable as if they already moved, even if the enemy phase has happened. Sometimes units are stuck gray, other times they're stuck at their normal color but selecting them isn't possible (the game thinks you're selecting the ground tile behind them.) Given enough time, these bugs will eat away your entire party until you have no party left to attack with, making the bugs a greater threat than the actual enemies. I even tried downloading this game and playing it in Flash Player offline in case these were Ruffle-only issues (I REALLY wanted to play this game...) but they continued to persist on both platforms.

Other bugs mostly include gibberish text and add to the confusion of a game that already has a lot of variables without explaining them to the player.

Excepting the bugs, I think the best improvement to make to this game would be to slim down the party size and size of the opposition for the first battle to make it easier for the player to learn their own arsenal. Perhaps one close-range, one long-range, one support, and one cavalry character would be a good, diverse cast without overwhelming the player (especially since the graphical distinctions between different characters are going to be lost on a new player that thinks they all look the same.) To this point, having allied characters flash a different color from enemy colors would also be useful, as I occasionally got confused as to which ones were mine.

Also, one of the features I liked about FFT was the ability to attempt to use skills even if there were no targets in range. This made it easy to see how far a ranged fighter could reach BEFORE moving them, allowing you to keep from wandering unnecessarily deep into enemy territory.

Absolutely awesome concept and the execution is almost there, but it looks like this game massively overscoped for the time given.

I had never even heard of this game until a bunch of tributes popped up for the Game Jam this year. The Pico's School influence is obvious and it's mildly hilarious hearing random Madness Combat music throughout the whole thing, but ultimately these influences serve to remind that the mediocre quality of the graphics and animation are NOT just a sign of the times; similar content made the in the same era (or sometimes much earlier) had comparable or sometimes superior quality.

With all that out of the way, it's a solid recreation of a point and click adventure with a school setting, but it doesn't bring much new to the table. It's not terribly complex either from a design or gameplay standpoint to comb through each room for items and use them wherever you can from start to finish.

The atmosphere is great and I really like the level design - you get some short, easy tasks (key, bedroom, bathroom) to familiarize yourself with the map (and simultaneously build suspense) before the chase sequences begin. The non-linear tasks do a great job of forcing you to visit areas where Mr. Fingers is likely to be, which of course lends itself to having to bait him away from your objective before circling back via an indirect route.

The controls are a bit goofy but make sense when you realize that the arrow keys are meant to be face buttons. A lot of the menu options are unnecessary (brightness does nothing, there's no reason to keep the notes separate from items when your inventory is so small, the map could easily be an item in your inventory instead of its own option, that kind of thing) and I also dislike that the selected item in the menu jumps back to the first option any time you go backward in the menu hierarchy - this is a small thing but makes a huge difference.

By far the biggest issue in the game is that the combination of how easy it is to die and the lack of checkpoints can make for a very frustrating experience, especially with relatively slow animations throughout the game. The note to mash the down button to escape a grapple would have been nice if the font were a bit bigger, and I had to figure out on my own that tapping right (square?) repeatedly was necessary to actually run at a decent speed. This on its own is annoying, but it's also possible for Mr. Fingers to appear in a doorway just as you're trying to enter it, leading to you being caught immediately. Some kind of pity system (Mr. Fingers can't enter a door if you're close enough to it, and entering a room pushes Mr. Fingers back a minimum amount if he's right on the other side of the door) would make the game feel much more fair. As it is, there were points where I was tempted to just wait for him to show up so I didn't get flanked the instant I tried leaving a room, especially because restarting is so frustrating.

Aesthetically this game is great. The music is probably the high point, but the monochromatic blue of the house is surprisingly atmospheric for all its simplicity.

The tone and composition reminds me a lot of Super Solvers: Challenge of the Ancient Empires. I like the sound of this a lot, but the melody wanders aimlessly for a lot of it and makes the whole song sound more like a solo. There also isn't very much in the way of dynamics and development. This is par for the course for video game music, but makes the ending feel abrupt; I think this would work better as a looping track.

My recommendation would be to take some of your favorite parts from this and condense it into ~30 seconds, then use it as a bridge for something a bit more structured and repetitive.

I'm an easy target for djent stuff, and this is damn good. A tad repetitive, but enough changeups to keep it from being a glaring issue (with it going full Doom toward the end.) Mixing is a little muddy but otherwise tight.

I like the layering a lot, but I'm kind of lukewarm on the sample choice. The drums are a little weak, and sometimes it just feels like there's too much going on, especially with the samples being kind of short and repetitive.

Curious to see how this sounds with vocals over it, the tone is different and the 3/4 time signature would be challenging to spit to.

I'm a big fan of this art style. The high contrast and simple shapes make this really stylized.

Crazy amount of detail and great contrast between the low saturation characters and vibrant background. The bullets in the foreground are a bit distracting, especially with the blur effect on them.

This is a really cool concept, I'd like to see the folding/unfolding of this character animated! Certain parts of the body lack a bit of detail, and the wheel itself really just looks like three concentric circles.